


all the pretty little horses

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amputation, Established Relationship, Family Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Post-Canon, Trauma, in which everyones back on earth and keith and lance have a galra daughter, very brief descriptions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 22:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11344341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “I want to name her Chloe,” Lance had said with his nose buried in the crook of Keith’s shoulder. He circled his arms around Keith’s back, digging his hands into his boyfriend’s t-shirt and clutching so tightly Keith wondered what, exactly, it was Lance was so scared of happening.“We can do that,” Keith said. “We can do that. I like it. Chloe.”





	all the pretty little horses

**Author's Note:**

> this is . The [Second post-canon/returning-to-normal-life klance fic ive written](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9447677) and honestly who is surprised but this time with an added twist: klance-as-dads! its gay and good and i love them but also i accidentally hurt my own heart writing this. whoops
> 
> **TWs** : this cld ppppossibly require an m rating? theres 1 (one) scene that involves mentions of previous gore (lance had his leg amputated unwilling at one point), but since it was only 1 scene i wasnt sure if it was enough to tag as m. but if that is a trigger and/or u want to skip that part, it starts at the line "Other times it's Lance" and ends at "If Lance does wake up"
> 
> also they both have ptsd in this from war/other related things, so blanket warning that i mention tht quite a bit. the same section with the amputation thing involves them with nightmares, so start at "Sometimes, it isn’t Chloe that wakes first in the night" and go to the next paragraph break if u wanna skip that
> 
> pidge is not a main focus in this fic but she is there and she is trans so heyyy wassup. i lov trans girl pidge too much to Not include that hc into everything i write with her

At 2:03 A.M., Keith wakes to crying.

“Lance,” he mumbles, sitting up sleepily. Lance makes some sort of displeased noise, somewhere between words and a groan, and the arms around Keith’s middle attempt to keep him in bed. “Lance, get up. It’s your turn.”

“Is not.” Even as he says it, Lance’s arms retreat from around Keith and he sits up, peeling the bedsheets back and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, all while still blinking his eyes open. He shuffles around next to the bed, looking for his prosthetic. Once on, the floorboards creak under his weight as he makes his way to the cradle pressed up against the wall of their shared bedroom, already making gentle hushing noises even before he gets to their daughter.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Keith hears him mumbling to her. Lance picks her up, rocking her in his arms easily. “Shhh, no need to cry. What’s wrong? Are you hungry?”

Chloe stops crying to make some sort of babbling noise in response, and Lance’s lips pull up into a tired but fond smile. In the dark, her skin looks even more blatantly alien next to Lance’s, light purple against deep brown, her white hair illuminated by the thin strips of light that stream in from their half-closed blinds. Outside their small apartment, the streetlights are all on, and the moon is full tonight.

Keith had made a big deal of it being Lance’s turn to calm her, but he can’t return to sleep now that he’s awake. That’s not a skill he’s ever possessed—growing up the way that he did didn’t allow luxuries like that—but years spent always on edge, always prepared to jump at a moment’s notice to someone’s aid have only reinforced how light of a sleeper he is. It’s frustrating sometimes, now that he doesn’t need it to survive, but tonight, he doesn’t mind so much. He leans back against the headboard, yawning as he watches Lance stand in front of the cradle, talking in a quiet, warm voice to Chloe as he rocks her, the voice he reserves only for her and Keith and his younger siblings and cousins. Keith has come to associate that voice with home. Safety.

After a few minutes, Chloe finally settles down. She coos and reaches out a small hand for Lance, grabbing onto his night shirt and bunching the fabric up in her tiny fists. From the bed, Keith watches Lance’s smile as he talks softly to her, watches Chloe’s when she smiles back, and his chest hurts with something he’s still getting used to. But it’s a good kind of hurt.

 

\--

 

Chloe is named after her aunt.

When they’d returned home, the reunion was not all happy. Keith had said, so long ago, that Pidge wasn’t the only one with a family that missed her, wasn’t the only one with people to return to, and he had been right; _everyone_ had someone they missed, someone they wanted to survive for. Even Keith had wanted to return to that shack, to find more out about his real parents and his bloodline.

They missed a lot while they were gone. Being absent for over a decade would do that. But no one missed so much as Lance—Lance, with his huge family; with his dozens of cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles; with his warm-hearted mother and his amiable father and their paired laugher lines. The McClains were a clan of their own. They were so welcoming, and warm, and they were everything Keith could have wanted from a family, everything he had ever envied and resented about Lance, once upon a time, put into a tangible thing.

Lance left Earth with six siblings—four sisters, two brothers—waiting for him to get back. When he finally did, he returned to only five.

_A car accident,_ his father explained to him, and it was only Lance who cried so loudly, who shook so violently, that night. It had been years. The wound would never heal for any of them, but it was only fresh for Lance. She had been twenty-three when she passed—only three years older than she was the day Lance left. She died thinking Lance was dead, never returning home.

Lance wore black when he visited the cemetery that day. Hunk, Pidge, Shiro, and Keith all did the same.

Chloe had not been Chloe at the time that Lance received the news. She’d come to Earth without a name, not because she did not have one, but because her Galra name was virtually unpronounceable to Keith and Lance’s tongues; Allura and Coran were the only ones capable of saying it correctly. In the few months before they’d returned to Earth when they were taking care of her, Lance had taken to calling her _Ra_ —a shortened, watered down nickname meant to resemble her original Galra name—or simply by pet names, the same kinds his mother had called him growing up.

The night after he’d received the news, when they were back at the McClain’s house, Lance had tip-toed downstairs to where Keith was meant to be sleeping on the living room couch. He’d curled up next to Keith and kissed him as if he were scared Keith would disappear somehow—like the harder he pressed their lips together, the realer the two of them become, the less likely it was they would float away or that Keith would dissolve under Lance’s fingertips. Keith kissed back, and when they pulled away, he thought maybe Lance had stolen the air from his lungs. He had never known Lance’s sister, but even he was feeling the weight of her death, more than seven years later.

“I want to name her Chloe,” Lance had said with his nose buried in the crook of Keith’s shoulder. He circled his arms around Keith’s back, digging his hands into his boyfriend’s t-shirt and clutching so tightly Keith wondered what, exactly, it was Lance was so scared of happening.

“We can do that,” Keith said. “We can do that. I like it. Chloe.”

“Chloe,” Lance whispered again, and when his shoulders heaved this time, Keith found his own throat tighten, felt the prickle of secondhand grief at the corners of his eyes.

The next day, the name had settled into its place, the word rolling out of Keith’s mouth as if it had always been that way, as if this was the way it was always meant to be. She is Chloe now, her middle name the original Galra one. They never did decide on a last name.

But Keith doesn’t mind that so much. It’s the least of their problems.

 

\--

 

He wishes it was not the least of their problems.

 

\--

 

In the morning, Keith sits in front of Chloe’s high chair, watching her as she plays with a bowl of Cheerios. She isn’t eating them, only patting them on the high chair’s tray and splaying them out into different patterns with such intensity Keith thinks she might be trying to write something. She laughs when a few Cheerios go sliding off the tray and onto the ground.

Keith bends to pick them up. “Messy,” he chastises halfheartedly. Chloe grins at him when he sits back up, holding out the dirty Cheerios for her to take. She never eats them like she’s supposed to. Keith doesn’t know why, only that she finds them a better toy than breakfast.

“Don’t give her those when they’ve been on the ground,” Lance says, reaching over the table to take the pieces out of Keith’s hand. He gets up from the kitchen table and throws them away in the trashcan they keep under the sink.

“She wasn’t going to eat them,” Keith defends.

“Yeah, but it’s still _gross_.” Lance returns to his chair and the plate of eggs he was working on. He doesn’t have a big appetite anymore, especially not in the morning. It used to be that after battles, he would eat enough of whatever Hunk or Coran had prepared for the whole team—but something had switched when they’d returned to Earth. Now, Keith has to remind him to eat regularly.    

Keith rolls his eyes. “Don’t be such a baby about it.”

“Oh, _I’m_ the baby?” The way they’re sitting, Keith’s chair is positioned to face Chloe, Lance on the opposite end of their small table. He leans over with his elbow on the table and his palm in his hand until their faces are close to one another, and despite his words, he’s smiling. He’s already dressed for the day, his hair combed and styled, his face freshly shaved and scruff-free. Keith actually kind of likes it when he leaves some grown out, but he doesn’t let Lance know that; he’d never let it go.

“You said it, not me.” Keith taps a finger against Lance’s nose gently before returning to his own plate of breakfast—eggs, toast, sausage. He cooks most days. He’d been forced to provide for himself long before he was kicked out of the Garrison, just by virtue of his father’s absence; Lance, on the other hand, has never _not_ had someone to provide for him, not even when they were still forming Voltron. He knows a few dishes that his mother taught him when he was younger, but nothing that would warrant doing it frequently.

Sometimes, when they have a moment alone—when Chloe is surprisingly still asleep after they’ve both gotten up, or when Hunk or Shiro is babysitting her for a day, or whenever it is they have just a moment to themselves—he’ll cook for Keith, homey breakfasts served in bed or attempts at romantic dinners. It’s rare, but it’s one of the ways he likes to spoil Keith when he can.

“Asshole,” Lance says fondly.

“Don’t curse in front of the kid,” Keith reprimands.

“We have never, not _once_ followed that rule.”

Keith smiles and, because Lance is still leaning forward, obliges him with a peck on his cheek. Lance turns his face in time to catch Keith’s lips instead, the hand on the table coming to cup Keith’s face and pull him closer, tilting his head into the kiss to deepen it almost immediately as if he’d been waiting for the chance to do just this. The way they’re leaning over the table is awkward, but Keith doesn’t pull away.

It isn’t until Chloe starts babbling that they stop. Recently, she’s started making noises that _might_ count for their names (Keith think it’s a coincidence, while Lance insists she’s going to start forming full words soon), and now every time she talks Lance listens intently, responding to her as if they’re having a full-fledged conversation. He never speaks to her in baby-talk, claiming that actually hinders her learning, and Keith can’t help but find it endearing, the way Lance focuses all his attention on her when she starts making noises, the way he drops everything to listen to her. He can’t even be upset when Lance ends the kiss to turn to Chloe instead.

“Yeah, I hear ya.” He nods empathetically to her. She makes a sound that could pass for the beginning of a _K_ word, and Lance looks to Keith as if she’d spoken something about him. “What, you have something to tell me about your other dad? Is it a secret?”

Hearing Lance refer to Keith as Chloe’s dad does something to him that he isn’t quite sure what to do with. It’s the same thing he feels when he watches Lance rocking her softly, when he hears Lance singing to her from another room, when he comes home to the two of them curled up asleep on their king-sized bed, Chloe held protectively in Lance’s arms as if to shield her from something.

Everyone had questioned it when they’d originally chosen to take Chloe in. Shiro had sat Keith down, far away from the rest of the team, and asked him seriously if this was _really_ what he wanted to do, if he was ready for the responsibility of being a father, if he was sure he wanted to share that responsibility with Lance, if either of them was ready for the dedication and care and effort it would take to properly raise not only a child, but an orphaned Galra child at that. If he realized what exactly it was he was signing himself up for.

At the time, Keith hadn’t known, hadn’t had answers to any of that. He’d only known that, when he and Lance had found Chloe crying and alone in the lifeless arms of a Galra woman who might have been her mother, they couldn’t just leave her there to die. Voltron was meant to save; wouldn’t it have gone against everything they believed in to ignore this child, so obviously in need of saving?

And maybe Keith had seen something in Chloe’s orphaned state that he saw in himself, had felt something familiar when she’d cried and kicked and looked scared and _aware_ as Keith picked her up. He knew it was crazy to think she had known what was going on, but when she’d fit so snugly in his arms, when she’d tried to bite with sharp, alien teeth, he was reminded of the Malmoran blade he still kept with him, remembered the vaguest impression of a mother he had long since forgotten and the face of his father all those years ago.

And maybe, when he and Lance returned to the castle with a living thing wrapped in a blood-stained blanket, he hadn’t been sure of anything except that this was what he needed to do. If they had left her there to die, he would’ve had the memory of her crying face imprinted behind his eyelids for the rest of his life. They had killed before, they’d let people die before—but it had only ever been Galra soldiers, never civilians, and certainly never _children_. If he’d left with the knowledge that she was going to starve to death there, that memory would haunt him much longer than any memory of a blade impaled in an enemy’s stomach or a crashed ship full of unknown passengers.

In the days that passed immediately following Chloe’s arrival, Voltron was at a loss for what to do. Who would take care of her? _Could_ they even take care of her when they were still meant to be fighting a war? Was she safe if she stayed with Coran while Voltron and Allura fought? Could they provide for an eighth living thing? What would they name her? Where would she sleep? What would they _do_?

Allura named her first—the Galran name that Lance shortened to _Ra_. After a few weeks, they decided she would stay, and slowly, unintentionally, she became Lance and Keith’s responsibility. It wasn’t until they made it official to the team she was theirs that Shiro took Keith aside.

Keith knows now what the answer to all those questions are. He thinks maybe she was meant to be Lance and Keith’s, to be his, the way that her name was meant to be Chloe. Or maybe it only feels that way to him.

Watching Lance speak to her and Chloe attempt to speak back, it hits Keith with a sudden weight that he has never loved anybody as much as he loves the two of them.

 

\--

 

Sometimes, it isn’t Chloe that wakes first in the night.

Sometimes it’s Keith, clutching at an invisible wound at his side, gasping for air and grabbing at his neck as if to feel for a rope or a large, clawed hand that might be there, kicking his feet to swim to the surface of water he is not submerged in. The covers flay and are pulled off of him and his boyfriend, who wakes the moment Keith startles—they are both light sleepers. Lance is sitting up quicker than Keith can realize he isn’t drowning, he isn’t bleeding out, he isn’t being lifted off the ground and slammed against a wall by an enemy’s hand at his throat. Before it even registers that he’s _here_ , he’s _home_ , he’s _safe_ , there is already a hand on the small of his back, Lance whispering things to him to calm him down.

_We’re here, we’re fine, you’re fine, you’re not in danger, we’re fine, I’m here_ , Lance sometimes murmurs to him. _I’m here, I’m here, I’m here_.

_Lance_ , Keith sometimes breaths, the one word saying so much more than anything he could ever force out of his lungs, still gasping for air he hasn’t yet realized he already has. Sometimes, he only clutches at Lance’s forearms, only leans his head into Lance’s chest, presses his forehead to bare, familiar, scarred skin and forces himself to breathe as Lance mumbles instructions to him, _in for six, out for eight, that’s it, keep breathing, you’re fine, I’m here, I love you, you’re safe_.

Sometimes, they fall back asleep like that, pressed together, holding on so tightly like something can rip them apart at any given moment, and sometimes they stay awake for the rest of the night, watching the dawn come and the morning light flicker in through their bedroom window as Chloe wakes.

Other times it’s Lance, a scream ripped from his throat as he relives the same pain, the same day, the same event over and over. Keith knows it is almost always the same thing because Lance has told him, because Shiro has experienced the same nightmares, because he always wakes with a hand reaching for his left leg as if still feeling the press of a blade against his calf—as if still feeling the metal kissing his skin before ripping into it, as if still feeling the bone and tendons and nerves as they were mutilated. As if still feeling it heal, always, as if it had never fully healed to begin with. He grasps at the space where his left leg used to be, reaching frantically under the bedsheets for something that is no longer there, phantom fear.

Keith sometimes wakes before it can delve any deeper, but the damage is already down, and when he turns to his boyfriend he sees that Lance is sweating buckets. Sometimes he is crying, the tears spilling over before he is even fully conscious, and sometimes he is so numb when he finally wakes that it frightens Keith. Lance isn’t meant to be numb; Lance is so full of life, so full of emotion, that to see him hollowed out, even when Keith knows he will return to himself in a few hours, scares the shit out of him.

_Wake up_ , Keith sometimes says to Lance, because unlike Keith, he will sleep through his own screaming, his own nightmares. If Lance doesn’t wake up when Keith talks to him, Keith will curl up close to him and do his best to soothe him while he’s still in his dreams, whispering to him as if he’s awake and dutifully ignoring Chloe’s crying at having been woken so suddenly. He’ll repeat the things Lance says to him on nights when Keith is the one in need of calming, _you’re safe_ and _I’m here_ and _I love you, we’re alright, I love you_. He repeats these things until Lance’s breathing evens again, until he stops trying to fight off an enemy that is not there, until his flailing stops and he is still again.

If Lance does wake up, he wakes to Keith next to him, a hand on his forearm in an attempt to soothe him. Sometimes, once he’s fully awake and realizes what happened, Lance will try to blow it off like it was nothing, will try to pretend he hadn’t just been reliving one of his worst memories, will make a joke and mumble an apology and roll out of bed to calm Chloe down and rock her back to sleep again.

Other times, he doesn’t say anything at all before getting up and rocking Chloe back to sleep, and when he returns to bed, he still doesn’t say anything as he kisses Keith. These times, he presses their lips together slowly at first, Keith tasting an apology behind the action, and then harder, more insistently, until he’s sinking back into the sheets and they’re pressed against each other and they fall into a familiar pattern. But these times, it evolves into something frantic, something hungry, something scared. These times, Lance is the same as he was that night in his living room, acting like Keith will vanish if he isn’t quick enough. He slides between Keith’s legs, sucks a bruise into the skin of his thigh, and sometimes, Keith can feel it even then. The fear. The anxiety. The desperate plea for Keith to _stay stay stay stay._  

Keith wonders sometimes if Lance even realizes that’s what he’s pleading for. If he realizes that Keith can feel it, can tell even when he doesn’t speak a word.

 

\--

 

Lance sets his phone down next to him and looks up suddenly. “I’m getting a job.”

Keith looks up from where he’d been playing with Chloe. They’re on the living room floor, Chloe messing with some colorful blocks while Keith moves the blocks towards her, absentmindedly making something out of the extra ones. They form what might resemble a spaceship. He raises an eyebrow at Lance and starts taking down the ship.

“Okay,” he says. “Where?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

Chloe knocks a red piece into a blue one, grinning at the dulled noise it makes. The wisps of white hair on the top of her head bounce when she knocks them together a second, then third time gleefully.

“Okay,” Keith says again.

“Hunk said I could work with him if I wanted,” Lance says. He’s sitting on the couch. He crosses his legs right over the left, then uncrosses them, then crosses them again another time. “He says the auto repair shop is a pretty good place to be. I’m not _that_ great with cars, though, so I might ask Stephanie if she could get in a good word for me at her place.”

Lance’s younger sister—twenty-four now, three years younger than Lance—started working as a hostess at a restaurant that just opened in town. Keith takes a moment to imagine Lance working at Hunk’s mechanic shop, then imagines him as a host.

“Alright,” he says, taking off what might have passed as the spaceship's left wing.

“Are you upset?”

“What?”

Lance fidgets. “You just…I don’t want to, you know, do anything that you’re not okay with.”

“Lance,” Keith says, frowning. “It’s your life, I’m not going to—“

“I know, I know. But if I get a job, it means we’ll have to have a stricter schedule when it comes to Chloe, and I don’t wanna accidentally put too much responsibility onto you when it’s supposed to be a joint thing, you know? Especially since I don’t technically _need_ a job. It’s not like I’d be working to make ends meet, so it’d be a shitty thing for me to shove that all on you if you’re not okay with it.”

Anyone else would ask why Lance would even _want_ to work if he knows that neither of them technically needs a job. The government pays them plenty for all the work they did, fighting and killing and risking their lives to protect Earth—and the whole universe for that matter—from a threat that ninety-nine percent of humans didn’t even realize was there. When they’re returned to Earth, they’d been treated like war heroes—which they were, Keith guessed. They’d essentially retired, and now, they didn’t need to worry about careers or anything. Most people wouldn’t bother to continue working then, when they have Chloe to raise and wounds of every kind to continue nursing.

But Keith gets it. He understands why Lance _needs_ something. Hunk opened his own auto repair shop when they settled back down into life; Pidge applied for college; Shiro continued his teaching at the Garrison. It’s only Keith and Lance that hadn’t immediately searched for something to keep them occupied, something to keep their minds busy so they wouldn’t fall into the same blackness that they can all so easily succumb to. Chloe is a good distraction, but there is no way with her to pretend that they didn’t experience the things they did, that they didn’t fight aliens and save planets and take down a tyrannical empire. With a Galra child to care for, there is no way to ignore that.

Keith is only surprised that it took this long for Lance to decide he needs something to do. They’ve been back at Earth for almost half a year now.

“I’m not upset,” Keith assures him. “I promise. I don’t mind you getting a job. It’d be good for you.”

“Yeah?” Lance’s shoulders relax.

“Mhmm.”

Chloe looks up at Keith, bored of smashing the red and blue pieces together, and watches as he finishes taking apart the spaceship. It’s only a pile of blocks now, returned to its original shapelessness.

“We should have everyone over soon,” Keith says.

“For dinner?”

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

“I can ask Hunk to bring his lemon meringue pie,” Lance muses. He leans his head on his palm, his elbow resting on the couch’s arm as he watches Keith begin building another structure. Chloe watches him closely, her iris-less eyes trained on Keith’s hands. Everything about Chloe is alien, but it is the eyes—all a deep purple, no difference between the iris and the whites—that have been the hardest for Keith to get used to.

Sometimes Keith wonders what it would be like if Chloe were biologically his. If she would look completely human the way Keith does, or if she would show Galra. When people look at Keith and Lance and Chloe, they tend to see Chloe as something completely foreign, removed one hundred percent from either of her parents, but Keith can’t help but think how deceptive looks are.

Keith knows it’s a little silly, but he can already see bits of himself and Lance in Chloe—her perpetual grin, her twinkly laugh, her stubbornness. He wonders if that is nature or nurture.

“That’d be good,” Keith repeats.

 

\--

 

Maybe they should pick a last name.

 

\--

 

Lance isn’t as bothered by losing his left leg as the nightmares would make one believe.

When he’s awake and conscious, there is no end to the jokes he makes. He jumps at any opportunity to play tricks on someone with his prosthetic (usually his siblings), he talks about it openly and never tries to hide it from strangers in public or family members, he doesn’t try to pretend it isn’t hurting him if he’s in pain. As inherently open of a person as Lance could never hide something like that for others for long, and besides, he doesn’t _want_ to. He has no shame in it.

It’s only when he’s asleep, when he has no control over what images his mind chooses to relay, does he become bothered by it.

 

\--

 

Keith goes out with Pidge one Wednesday afternoon. He meets her at a coffee shop twenty minutes from his apartment and they talk, and talk, and talk, about Chloe and Pidge’s college friends and the classes she hates and the pie Hunk brought to their get-together the other night. She tells stories from her night out with her new friends, talks about a girl who asked her out on a date recently, laments hang overs and the fact that she still hasn’t bothered to get her driver’s license. She is twenty-four; her hair is grown out at the back, pulled into a low ponytail at the back of her neck, her clothes some mixture of feminine and practical, the kinds of things she wore before she was forced to pretend to be her brother. She got her first shot of estrogen two weeks ago, after waiting four months for the doctor’s appointment, and she is smiling. She is happy.

Keith is happy for her. He likes catching up. Living with only six other people for ten years does something to their closeness, and now, when he goes more than two days without seeing any of them, Keith feels like he’s going through withdrawals. No, that’s not accurate—rather, he feels like a part of himself is gone. Missing. Seeing her again is very much wanted, for however long they’re able to.

She has to finish a paper for her economics class, though, so Keith leaves the coffee shop four hours later. He heads home, his wallet and heart just a little bit lighter. He already misses her and Hunk and Shiro and Allura and Coran, and it’s only been a few days since they were all at Keith’s apartment, laughing over pasta and old stories.

The first thing Keith hears when he gets home is Lance’s voice carried in from their bedroom. A few months ago, he made his mother teach him some Spanish lullabies for him to sing to Chloe, and he’s putting them to good use now, the words travelling out the open bedroom door, through the hallway, to the foyer, where Keith stands with his hand on the doorknob and his heart in his throat.

He stands there for a while, just listening, afraid that if he closes the door or moves even a little bit, he’ll miss something. Lance doesn’t do this that often, but Keith loves it every time he does. He wishes Lance would sing more. Maybe he should tell him that.

The words switch from Spanish to English, and it’s a song Keith doesn’t recognize.

_“Hush-a-bye,_

_don’t you cry,_

_go to sleep, my little baby._

_When you wake,_

_you shall have_

_all the pretty little horses_.”

 

Keith slips his shoes off and closes the door as quietly as he can, leaving his keys and wallet on the kitchen counter on his way to his and Lance’s bedroom. The door is cracked open, and from the hallway, he can make out Lance sitting on their bed with Chloe in his lap. He’s smiling at her as he sings, and Keith knows without seeing it that Chloe is smiling back.

He pushes the door open slightly, and Lance glances up at him where he stands in the doorway, never pausing his singing. He turns the smile to Keith. That lullaby is over, and he switches to another one Keith doesn’t know.

 

“ _Oh my darling, oh my darling,_

_oh my darling, Clementine._

_You are gone and lost forever,_

_dreadful sorry, Clementine._ ”

 

This time, Keith interrupts him. “That’s horrible.”

“I know,” Lance agrees simply. “But it sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”

Keith huffs and shakes his head, coming into the room completely and sitting on the edge of the bed next to Lance. Upon seeing him, Chloe starts crawling out of Lance’s lap to him; he reaches over and picks her up, setting her on his lap instead.

“Have you been good for Lance?” he asks, because Lance’s habit of talking to her like she can understand him has rubbed off.

“She’s always good for me. It’s only you she’s difficult for,” Lance says, grinning. Keith rolls his eyes.

“How was seeing Pidge?”

“It was good.” Chloe grabs his hand with her own small one. Her fist just grabs around his thumb. “She’s doing good.”

“College?”

“She’s thriving,” he says.

“Figures a nerd like her would,” Lance laughs. They sit in silence for a moment after that, Keith watching Chloe as she plays with his finger, fascinated by him.

“You didn’t have to stop singing just because I’m here,” Keith says quietly.

“You said it was horrible.”

“I meant the lyrics,” he huffs.

Lance snorts. He moves so he’s behind Keith, nuzzling his nose into the back of Keith’s neck. Keith is sure his hair tickles him like that, but Lance never complains. For all Lance used to make fun of Keith’s hair, he hasn’t said a word about it since Keith grew it out even longer. If it was considered a mullet before, Keith can’t imagine what Lance would consider it now, if he weren’t so busy running his fingers through it all the time.

“You have any suggestions for something happier?” Lance asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t really know any lullabies.”

“We should get Allura to teach us some Altean ones,” he mumbles.

Keith hums in agreement. He wishes he knew any Galran ones. He wishes he knew anything more about the Galra than what little he does now—for both Chloe’s and his own sake.

Lance is silent for another moment. Finally, he says, “It’s not really a lullaby.”

“Are the lyrics as bad as the other one you were singing?”

“Not even close,” he says. Right against Keith’s ear, he sings, _“Somewhere over the rainbow…_ ”

 

\--

 

They don’t know Chloe’s exact birthday, but when they first brought her back to the ship, Coran estimated that she was around three months old when they found her.

Nine months after they took her in, and six months after they’d returned to Earth, Keith and Lance throw her a birthday party.

Everyone else comes. It’s a small party, only the seven of them with Chloe in the middle of it all. Hunk made her a birthday cake, and everyone brings presents—toys or clothes or supplies for Lance and Keith. Lance tries to get her to wear one of the party hats he half-jokingly bought at Party City the day before, but she stubbornly refuses to wear it, and after a few futile attempts, he gives up and wears it himself instead. Keith rolls his eyes fondly and declines when Lance invites him to his own hat.

They sing “Happy Birthday” to her, and she grins and claps through the whole song, loving how everyone’s gathered around her, all beaming and cooing at her. It had been—odd, for Allura and Coran at first, because accepting that one of their paladins was half-Galra was not the same as accepting that two of their paladins were raising a Galran child. But gradually, Chloe had grown on them, stealing their hearts the way she’s stolen everyone else’s. They now smile at her with the same sincerity as Hunk and Shiro and Pidge do, Coran making funny faces at her and Allura smoothing down the white curls on her head. According to Coran, her hair color should darken to a deep purple, almost black, as she gets older, but it’s been a year and it is still as shockingly white as always, almost rivalling Allura’s.

That night, Chloe falls asleep quicker than usual, tired from all the attention she’d gotten, and it leaves Keith and Lance a rare moment to themselves. They spend the time in bed, watching a rented movie on Lance’s laptop. Lance lays with his head on Keith’s shoulder, their hands entwined lazily above the bedsheets.

Once the movie ends, they don’t go to sleep right away. They stay up talking in hushed voices so as not to stir Chloe, stopping for a moment if they hear her make any noise. Eventually, the conversation steers towards today.

Lance says, “You know, we never decided on a last name.”

“I didn’t realize we were supposed to,” Keith says.

“Of course we were supposed to,” Lance laughs. “She has a first _and_ middle name. She should probably have a last, don’t you think?”

“I guess so.” He glances at his boyfriend where he’s leaned against Keith’s shoulder, and from here, he can see the line of Lance’s eyelashes, the way they flutter when he blinks, and the scar across his right eyebrow that cuts from his eyelid almost up to his hairline. It’s one of his fainter scars, but it’s still visible enough that strangers’ eyes flicker to it first. Keith doesn’t try to resist the urge to kiss the scar.

Lance shifts. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I didn’t even say anything,” Keith laughs.

“No, but you’re distracted,” Lance says, although he’s smiling too. “I guess I’m just too beautiful, huh?”

“You are,” Keith agrees. Lance looks up at him, and their eyes meet, and for a moment Keith understands exactly what Lance is going to do next, what he’s going to say, so much so that his heart thumps in his chest with the realization. This is the aftermath of forming Voltron so much, of having one brain between five people for a decade: there are still flickers of it, sometimes, when Keith just _knows_ how Lance feels, knows what he’s going to do and say and think next.

And it’s what allows the answer to leave his mouth at the same time that Lance asks him.

“Yes, fuck, of course, why wouldn’t I—“

“Will you marry me?”

 

\--

 

“McClain-Kogane.”

“Kogane-McClain,” Keith says, just to be difficult.

“That doesn’t sound as good.”

“Hyphenated last names always go alphabetically.”

“Fuck that.”

“No cussing in front of the kid,” he reprimands automatically.

Lance smiles from his place on the living room floor, his arms held out in front of him to catch Chloe if she falls. Waddling on her legs as she attempts to stand, Chloe smiles too. It mirrors her father’s.

It’s dumb, maybe, to be reminded of it again now, laying on his couch with his fiancé doing nothing more than sitting with their daughter as she practices standing, but it hits Keith, not for the first time, just how much he loves the two of them. How it might’ve been worth it, surviving everything, just to get to _here_ , to this destination—the living room of this small, shared apartment. Lance with a smile at the corners of his lips. Keith wearing his own. Happy.

He says, “We’ll figure it out.”

And Lance agrees, “We will.”

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on [tumblr](http://viscrael.tumblr.com) abt post-canon aus


End file.
